A Film Canon

 

 

King Kong stages a interesting, if slightly dated, encounter between primivitism and modernity, combining the ethnographic sensibility of Grass with a more entertainment driven, spectacular imperative, and effectively inventing a new genre - the adventure film - in the process. This is clearest in the second act, which takes place on a prehistoric island, transforms the travelogue into a rudimentary version of the quest narrative, and  attempts to visualise the evolutionary moment at which the 'human' arose, here figured in terms of Kong's assertion of the mammalian in the face of the reptilian, as well as his realisation that he has defended actress Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) for her beauty, rather than more practical requirements. Combined with the self-conscious misogyny of the first act, this conjures up a yearning for a prehistoric (or at least pre-Depression) division of gendered labour, a return to the most fundamental moment of human existence, whose necessary repression entails the symbolism of the third act. It's no coincidence that we learn about the protagonist's engagement to Darrow at the same moment that Kong is presented as a living crucifixion, nor that the latter's escape climaxes on the Empire State Building, the most phallic object on the New York City skyline. Both literalise the conception of the 'urban jungle', figuring city life as the experience of constantly sublimating those atavistic impulses awakened by the sheer sensory violence of modernist technology, here placed on a continuum with the exotic gore of the island, and its peoples' apotropaic, sacrificial rites.